As a Stirring the Fire volunteer over the last year and a half, I’ve enjoyed several conversations with STF Founder Phil Borges about his work. However, more people than myself need to hear the inspirational and visionary aspects he brings to his work, so we decided to have actual interviews on several topics with him. In today’s post he shares his thoughts on why he has decided to focus on women and girls. (Questions in italics.)

Young Cambodian Girl with a Younger Child on Her Back (Photo Danielle Prince)

In all of your international travels, your breadth of experience in documenting people’s stories, why focus on women and girls? Why is this important to you?

I started to notice how hard women and young girls work, and how much work they do. I travel mostly in the developing world and there you have to collect water and firewood and do all the cooking on open fires. In terms of child care, young girls are saddled with that at a very, very young age. I’ve seen girls who’ve just started to walk with a baby on their back. This is where it first started – just noticing this situation.

I met people from CARE who I ended up working with. These individuals started telling me things about not only what women and girls face in terms of work they do, but about a lot of the cultural traditions that discriminate against women and girls, or that harm women and girls like female genital cutting. The big thing for me was, at this point in my career, I was doing a lot of human rights work. I had started on the Tibetan project and from there I started doing things with Amnesty International. But all these stories, at the time I was telling them, were around “exogenous” issues. In other words they were issues that were being forced upon people from the outside: China taking over Tibet, the oil companies coming in and spoiling the Amazon and the tribal people paying the consequences. But the thing with women is it’s endogenous. It is embedded within the culture.

I really hesitated about getting involved with the issue. I didn’t get really involved until years after I had noticed all these things and learned that the discrimination and inequality was there. But I also learned how effective it was in changing gender inequality in terms of reducing poverty, bringing stability and peace to a country, helping with environmental sustainability. All these things improved when the lives of women and girls are enhanced with education, access to resources, healthcare.

What made you hesitate before taking on this vast subject of gender inequality?

Cultural imperialism. Who are we to say what another culture should do in terms of the way they assign roles to women and men?

So you didn’t want to become an “imperialist”.

That’s the big thing; it’s easy to slip into that [role]. I’m going over to Dolpa [Nepal] in a couple of days and there they have their shamans, their traditional healers, and we’re coming in and saying ‘we know how better to serve your health needs; we’re the great white fathers’. So it’s always something you have to be on guard for. We think we always have all the answers.

Phil Photographing Adorable Girls in Cambodia (Filming for UN Women, Photo Danielle Prince)

But there are so many issues around the world that you could focus on. What is personally important to you about gender equality?

I think it’s the most effective way to address the major ills that face humanity: poverty, war, environmental degradation. I think you get the most bang for your buck. It is the moral thing to do but more than that it’s the most practical thing to do. If you get down deeper into my psyche I’ve been raised by women and surrounded by women my whole life; women have cared for me and taken care of me. Single mom, sisters, wives, I’m a kept man by women (laughs). In my [orthodontic] practice I had all women, 14 assistants, except for one man. But I don’t know how much that plays into it. It could, it’s there. But it is a very practical thing when I think about it logically.

What do you have to say to people who take issue with the fact that you are a man, even as a strong ally for the women’s movement globally, doing this work?

You’ve got to bring the men into the movement to make it successful. I have women come up to me and say ‘I saw your book Women Empowered, saw it was written by a man and I just put it back down and didn’t even open it’. I’ve had them come up to me after one of my talks and apologize for what they said earlier. So I thought ‘wow, I wonder how many people do think that?’. I think, quite frankly, that the women’s movement has grown, and is maturing. It started as an anger-based movement. Women were pissed. I think [the anger] is something that any movement has to get passed eventually to make it a real strong, mature and holistic movement.

Phil and Cambodian Girl Taking a Break (Filming for UN Women, Cambodia, Photo Danielle Prince)

Why should people care about gender equality?

Because it is like civil rights. Why do we care about civil rights? Why do we want to treat each other like we like to be treated? Again, it is moral, but it is very, very practical in terms of addressing the issues that are very on our radar right now: peace, stability. Even in Liberia, you go to a place like that and you say ‘Charles Taylor came in and tore the place apart over 15 years’. The women came in, got together, and as a movement put an end to it. They have the first woman in Africa elected and who is bringing this country back from hell, really. The whole microcredit movement has been powered by women. Women, when they get money, they put it into the healthcare and the education of their kids. That’s why giving resources to women builds the infrastructure of a community so fast.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview with Phil Borges in which he talks more about his personal approach and experiences.